I’ve played a lot of shooters, and I’ve come to a very important conclusion: Warframe has the best reload animations of all time.
Here’s a dirty little secret that most game devs probably don’t want you to know about. Whenever you reload a gun in a first-person shooter, most of the time your character is just taking out the magazine and then slapping it right back in. Since the camera is locked pointing forward, you can’t really see yourself reach into a belt pouch to grab a new magazine, so there’s no need to animate the full range of motions required to actually reload a gun.
All the animator needs to do is make it look like you’re reloading when all you’re really doing is juggling a single magazine. From the outside, it usually looks something like this:
That’s basically the reload animation for 99% of shooters out there, from Battlefield to Call of Duty. And yes, I’m aware that occasionally a first-person shooter will get creative, but that’s the exception to the rule.
Warframe, though, is different. Because Warframe is a third-person game where the camera can wrap around your scary-ass space ninja, Warframe’s animators can’t take the easy way out and just have the player’s model fumble with a single magazine.
Instead, Warframe does the hard thing and makes reloading look good. How good? Well, lemme show you a few examples.
Here we have the Cedo, an extremely powerful fully automatic shotgun, and Lavos' signature weapon. The Cedo's magazine is stored in the stock, which hinges upwards for easy ejection. The player's Warframe knocks the magazine out with an elbow, then slaps in a fresh magazine in a single fluid motion. I could watch this animation for hours.
Next we have the Komorex, a high-powered Amalgam automatic sniper rifle. The bizarre protrusion just ahead of the trigger is actually a giant lever that ejects the magazine when pressed. Digital Extremes could have just finished the animation by bringing the Komorex back to the Warframe's shoulder, but instead, the spin at the end gives reloading the Komorex a certain dramatic flair.
The Quatz pistol is no less dramatic in its reloading. The player's Warframe flips the gun end over end to eject the magazine and then flips it back to chamber a round. Imagine doing that when there's a dozen alien monsters coming straight at you.
A fan favorite is the Twin Grakatas. Normally, a single Grakata serves as the standard Grineer assault rifle, but Warframes can dual-wield them to devastating effect. You'd think that reloading even a single Grakata would be a cumbersome process, but somehow a Warframe can reload two at once with a few spins. It's like watching a gun do ballet.
Warframe can do subtle reloads, too. The Tenora and Pandero recently got their Primed versions, and although both have a certain spin to them, this time it's the drum magazine that spins and not the entire gun itself.
That’s just a few examples, but trust me when I say that every single gun in Warframe is the same. There’s someone over at Digital Extremes that loves to make crazy reload animations, and it really shows. To you, I tip my hat, and I dare anyone out there to find a game with better reloads.